Illinois held slaves for more than 100 years
Because Illinois is a northern state and the former home of Abraham Lincoln, it isn’t typically associated with slavery. But there was slavery in Illinois for more than 100 years.
Even after Illinois entered the Union, loopholes in its laws allowed the practice to continue, making the future Land of Lincoln a quasi-slave state.
During the time Abraham Lincoln lived in Illinois, he never lived in a free state. The Great Emancipator’s home had slavery from the early 1700s until 1863, two years before Lincoln died. There were even slaves in his town of Springfield.
“Illinois has ever been a synonym of liberty, enterprise and progress…(yet) our own State once tolerated slavery,” wrote Ethan A. Snively in the 1901 Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society. For a time, “Illinois was as absolutely a slave State as was Mississippi.”
“No attempt was made to conceal the traffic in slaves,” according to the 1904 book, History of Negro Servitude in Illinois, by N. Dwight Harris. “Frequent notices of desirable negroes ‘for sale’ and ‘wanted’ appeared in the Western Intelligencer (newspaper) of Kaskaskia.” Slave auction notices appeared there, too.
Blacks were held here as chattel, or in perpetual servitude. They were taxed as property, given as gifts and used in Shawneetown’s salt mines and Galena’s lead mines. They were auctioned to the highest bidder and captured by professional kidnappers who sold them back to the South.
We know this partly from servitude and emancipation records at the Illinois State Archives in Springfield, which document the sale, auction, transfer and emancipation of both Native American and black slaves. We know this from the ads searching for runaway slaves and promoting slave catchers’ services in newspapers. Lastly, we know this from our state’s contradictory early laws and settlers’ stories.
Blame the French for bringing the peculiar institution to the state, but blame Illinoisans for perpetuating and increasing it.
In
1719, French businessman Philip Frances Renault brought 500 slaves from
“San Domingo” to develop a mine near Fort Chartres, which is now
Prairie du Rocher in southwestern Illinois. It failed, so Renault sold
his slaves to residents and left, according to Harris’ book.
Slavery
remained legal under subsequent British rule but things got trickier
when Illinois land became part of the U.S. Northwest Territory in 1787.
Although the Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery and “involuntary
servitude,” territorial leaders decided it meant that new slaves
couldn’t be introduced here, but existing ones could remain enslaved.
Illinois’
first territorial governor, slave owner and lawyer Ninian Edwards,
whose slave-owning son of the same name became Lincoln’s brother-in-law
in Springfield, decided that the Ordinance allowed for so-called
“voluntary servitude,” where a black person could “voluntarily” contract
with a white person to work for a specified period. “It was a way
around the slavery question,” says Illinois State Historian Sam Wheeler.
“Some of those contracts didn’t last the traditional seven years, but
99. So it was basically slavery under another name.” That name was
indentured servitude.
Edwards
believed that indentured servitude was “reasonable…, beneficial to the
slaves and not repugnant to the public,” according to Harris’ book. He
even skirted the law to force at least one of his slaves, who was just a
baby, to work for him longer. Male children born to territory slaves
could only be enslaved for 30 years, by law. But “the law was…evaded by
registering the children of colored servants for 35 in place of 30 years
of service on the ground that they were not born in Illinois,” wrote
Harris. “A case in point is Ninian Edwards’ Joseph, whom he
registered…to serve 35 years. Joseph was then 18 months old, and had
just been brought into the territory with his mother. All this the
masters did knowingly, believing, quite rightly, that no one would take
the trouble to prosecute them for holding their slaves to unlawful
service.”
With
this laissez-fair attitude about enslavement, it’s no surprise that
Illinois’ slave population increased almost fivefold while it
transitioned from a territory to a state, according to federal censuses.
In 1810, Illinois had 168 slaves; in 1820, it had 917, making it “the
only Northern state to show an increase in slave population” during that
time, wrote Mark W. Sorensen in the 2003 Illinois Heritage magazine.
When
Illinois earned statehood in 1818, the U.S. government required that it
be a free state. So, Illinois followed the country’s lead: The state
outlawed it, but still allowed it. “Illinois didn’t invent slavery; it
didn’t invent the fundamental contradictions about it,” Wheeler says.
“It reflected America.”
Illinois’ first
Constitution stated that “slavery and involuntary servitude” could not
be “introduced” in the state, except as criminal punishment. But it
required that already indentured slaves in Illinois be “held to their
contracts,” and it legalized the use of slaves in southern salt mines.
In another twist, it required gradual emancipation, stating that
indentured servants be freed at age 21 for males and age 18 for females.
This was “a gesture to anti-slavery residents,” according to
Christopher P. Lehman’s book, Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1787-1865.
Like
the southern states, one of the reasons Illinois allowed slavery was
economic. “The majority of the (Illinois) people were pro-slavery,”
wrote Snively in the 1901 Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society. “They
desired immigration from the slave states – they recognized slavery and
wealth as synonymous. So long as there was uncertainty as to property
rights in slaves, so long there would be no immigration from slave
states.”
Other
reasons, according to Harris’ book, were: slaves were needed to settle
the land, having slaves here would decrease the chances of a slave riot
by dispersing them around the country, and “it would provide the colored
people with a partial escape from the servitude of the South by the
possibility of a transfer to the lighter indentured servitude system of
Illinois,” and thereby be “an inestimable blessing to blacks.”
Most
of Illinois’ slaves were in the southern part of the state because
Illinois was settled from the south up. Many of the first settlers came
from southern states and were slave owners or at least pro-slavery;
those that had slaves wanted to keep them. The majority of the state’s
early leaders were the same. Four governors owned slaves. As long as
Illinois leaders were pro-slavery, the state’s laws were, too.
Illinois
wasn’t the only Northern slavery state, however. Indiana’s 1816 state
Constitution outlawed slavery, but it, too, condoned indentured
servitude for a few decades. “Illinois was an outgrowth of Indiana,”
explains Wheeler. “That’s where Illinois got the concept (of indentured
servitude).”
For a
Northern state, however, Illinois might have had the worst slavery
record. The state was the only one in the upper Mississippi Valley,
which included Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, whose
Constitution allowed slavery and indentured servitude, says Lehman.
“What other states tended to do was to say that they are going to have
their states become free states, but they won’t allow free
African-Americans to live there.”
Illinois
didn’t go quite that far, but it got close. One year after Illinois’
Constitution was created, the state’s legislature passed some of the
worst “black codes” in the country, according to many accounts. These
laws made coming to or living here very difficult for blacks. The codes
were based on “the presumption that if you’re an African-American, you are enslaved,” says
Wheeler. The penalties for disobeying them “resembled those of slave
states and slave-labor plantations,” writes Lehman.
While
Illinois’ black codes didn’t directly relate to slavery, they
communicated its citizens’ main message to African-Americans: “Stay
away.” They also affected runaway slaves who traveled to Illinois, which
many did when escaping to freedom in Canada via Illinois’ active
Underground Railroad.
By 1845, Illinois’ slave population had increased to nearly 5,000, according to Roger Bridges’ article in the 2015 Fall/Winter Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. By
this time, an increasing number of free blacks had established homes in
the state as well. Perhaps not coincidentally, Illinois intensified its
black codes.
Those
laws prevented blacks from being in Illinois for more than 10 days, or
else they could be arrested, fined repeatedly and auctioned. Free blacks
and their children had to show certificates of freedom and register
with the county shortly after their arrival in Illinois. “Slaves or
servants” had to have written permission to travel more than 10 miles
from their master’s homestead or risk whipping. Blacks couldn’t gather
in groups of three or more to dance or make “revelry,” or they could be
lashed. And, to perpetuate their enslavement, blacks couldn’t vote or
testify in court.
Despite
its mostly pro-slavery stance, there were Illinoisans who fought the
system, even in its early days as a state. Our second governor, Edward
Coles, migrated from Virginia, where he inherited slaves. Defying
Illinois law, he freed them here and, thanks to lawsuits that went to
the state’s Supreme Court, was eventually spared punishment for the
crime. Coles advocated for a new constitution that would truly abolish
enslavement here.
Slavery
proponents seized on the call for a new constitution as an opportunity
to solidify Illinois as a true slave state. Between 1822 and 1824,
Illinois’ pro- and anti-slavery factions warred over the issue. After a
bitter election that drew an extraordinary number of voters, the
pro-slavery contingent lost. Still, it kept fighting. One abolitionist
lost his life to the group. Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton in 1837
by a pro-slavery mob because he published an anti-slavery newspaper.
Others like him throughout the state risked their lives by helping
runaway slaves flee to Canada or escape kidnapping.
“There
are many documented cases of kidnapping (of blacks) in southern
Illinois during the early nineteenth century, some recorded indictments,
but almost no convictions…” writes Darrel Dexter in his book, Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois. He
contends that the state’s laws encouraged the practice. An 1819 state
law mandated that citizens interrogate blacks to determine if they were
free or runaway slaves. If they were the latter, the white interrogator
received a monetary award.
Catching
a runaway and returning the person to the south could be lucrative.
Dexter tells the story of William Belford, Jr., a notorious southern
Illinoisan from Pope County who made a living as a slave hunter. It was a
family business. The Belfords earned as much as $300 for one runaway.
Free
blacks were prey, too. Those who lived in southern Illinois, especially
children, “were constantly under threat of kidnapping,” according to
Dexter. In 1824, Governor Edward Coles
called for antikidnapping laws and the legislature complied, but the
laws generally weren’t enforced. “Some kidnappers were so bold in
southern Illinois that they rode up to the cabins of free
African-American families and forcibly carried the children away,”
Dexter writes.
Although
Illinois’ new Constitution of 1848 outlawed “slavery and involuntary
servitude,” slavery continued, but probably on a very limited basis.
Records from the Illinois State Archives show the last recorded
emancipation of an Illinois slave was in 1863, in the middle of the
Civil War. Despite Illinois leading the call for soldiers to fight the
war over slavery, antiblack sentiment here remained strong.
“Just
because people in Illinois opposed slavery doesn’t mean they
necessarily endorsed equality among the races,” says David Joens, an
Illinois historian and director of the Illinois State Archives. “That’s a
big difference, and you see that in 1862 with the proposed new
constitution.”
In the
middle of the war, Illinoisans were asked to vote on a proposed new
state constitution and three amendments that would add the black codes
to it. They rejected the proposed constitution, but “overwhelmingly”
approved the black codes provision, Joens says.
Three
years later, while its own onerous black codes were still in effect,
Illinois led the country in approving the Thirteenth Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution, which its favorite son, Abraham Lincoln, had penned
to abolish slavery throughout the land. It didn’t repeal its black codes
until Feb. 7, 1865, one week later.
Though
the number of slaves in Illinois was small when compared to Southern
slave states, the legacy of slavery is interwoven in racist attitudes
that plague the state and the nation, says Ronald Bailey, who is head of
the department of African-American Studies at the University of
Illinois Urbana- Champaign.
“The
impact of slavery in Illinois has to be seen as a much bigger issue
than just the number of enslaved Africans who lived and worked in
Illinois,” he says. “It’s clear to me that part of the contemporary
trouble we’re having with worsening race relations that gets captured in
the Black Lives Matter movement and reactions to that, have to do with
whether or not people fundamentally believe that human beings are equal.
We have such a legacy of people of African descent being treated
unequally. I think that’s seeped into the way we handle issues of racial
inequality in a way that we have not come to grips with.”
Bailey
says Illinois’ history of slavery may be difficult for its residents to
accept. But he says it’s important for Illinoisans to recognize this
part of the state’s past and the ramifications that are still with us
today – which we all share a responsibility to address. “It’s been hard
for people to admit that this democracy, that this great nation … had
some of its most important roots in a system that was as oppressive and
exploitative as the slave system. And folks can very easily sweep that
under the rug and say, ‘My folks weren’t slave owners. Therefore, that’s
not something we should be concerned with today.’”
Tara
McClellan McAndrew is a lifelong Springfield resident whose roots go
back to central Illinois’ first settlers. She writes a local history
column and has written a book about the subject, Stories of Springfield: Life in Lincoln’s Town. Her plays about local history have been performed throughout the area.